Santa Cruz, CA and New York, NY, (February 28): Tarantella, Inc., a wholly
owned subsidiary of The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOC), and FNX
Limited, a leader in web-enabled trading solutions to the global capital
markets, today announced a strategic technology alliance. Under this agreement,
Tarantella and FNX will work in partnership to deliver FNX's Sierra ASP
product - a fully outsourced, end-to-end trading solution, on Tarantella
Enterprise 3 web-enabling software.
Designed for global implementation across multi-site, multi-entity treasury
operations, Sierra System fulfills industry requirements for a high volume
global treasury system.
David Boldon, Head of Global Sales for FNX explains, "We realized that to grow
our markets we needed to make Sierra System available on a wider basis. We
identified the need for a web solution that could reach across all sizes and
types of financial institutions, worldwide. FNX's aim was to offer clients a
solution that was sized to meet their needs, priced according their budgets,
and designed to evolve with their organization's technology directives."
Boldon continues, "Financial institutions are traditionally very cautious in
their acceptance of new technology. Tarantella Enterprise 3 software enables
FNX to deliver our time-tested Sierra solution as a fully web-based ASP
product."
Tarantella Enterprise 3 has become a key infrastructure component for FNX's web
initiatives by unifying Sierra System with new, secure Internet access methods.
The Tarantella Enterprise 3 software's non-invasive architecture allows FNX to
immediately web-enable Sierra. Sierra ASP is a fully managed, high
availability, secure service with 24x7 support, providing full Straight-Through
Processing (STP) for a variety of financial products, including FX Cash, FX
Options, Interest Rate Derivatives and Money Markets.
"About a year ago, we started testing various web-enabling products," said
Randy Warren, CTO at FNX. "In August 2000 we started looking seriously at
Tarantella Enterprise 3 software. The Sierra application demands the highest
levels of security; it has numerous hardware and software security devices that
are essential to the successful execution of the application. Tarantella
Enterprise 3 enabled us to combine all of the necessary security technologies
within a web environment. In addition, Tarantella Enterprise 3 was as much as
four times faster than some other products we tested, and twice as fast as its
closest competitor. With Tarantella Enterprise 3, it was very easy to get the
application up and working and we had few technical issues._
"The finance and banking industry is a key focus for Tarantella," said Mike
Orr, president of Tarantella, Inc. "Our Tarantella Enterprise 3 product makes
affordable, reliable, secure solutions available to a broader spectrum of users
today. It allows companies like FNX to deploy established and trusted solutions
such as Sierra across the Internet rapidly, and without expensive rewrites. It
also simplifies user and application administration."
"With FNX's knowledge of finance and capital markets, and our knowledge of
delivering high-end software in a cost-effective and quick manner, we are
ideally positioned to provide many new customers with a solution they
previously could not access or afford. We are delighted to join with FNX in
this partnership and look forward to opening new opportunities for our
organizations," concluded Orr.
